Or, more likely, so they can fucking monetize your usage like the greedy self entitled assholes they are.

And I don't just mean Microsoft.

It depends upon the corporation. With Windows they're going to track your usage data to improve the product. Microsoft would be over whelmed by uploading every computers key strokes every day. So each machine is configured to only upload on certain days. Plus every time it's uploaded, the user id, is given a different GUID. Microsoft couldn't track Windows usage data back to a single user if they wanted to. Let alone wrap it up into an advertisable unique user product. They can do this because there's a large enough user base that they a small slice still represents enough people to get how the product is used.

That's not possible for a Google product. The point of all Google products is to farm information from you. That's why they create the products. The default settings will always be "Upload everything to Googles server for purposes of turning you into a product to be sold".

some sites deliberately stop their users from being as secure as possible, for no really justifiable reason.

Perhaps the website has had issues with some sort of script, or bad actor, who just pastes password guesses into the field. Then the site admin found that blocking pastes blocked the software which was trying to attack them.

I wonder what the programmers who worked on Watson think about that? A system like Watson isn't creating anything new though, Watson is doing pattern matching and natural language synthesis. Watson is basically saying "Given the words in your question, here is the probable answer, and here is where I got that information". A lot of programming is "Do something new."

Given that this program is exposing them to STEM courses, I don't see how this is forcing them into STEM fields. You won't be able to find a single course in school that everyone is interested in. So given that your complaint is that 'not everyone is interested in STEM' as the reason to not teach Science Technology Engineering or Math subjects in school, if you apply that to any subject, there wouldn't be any subjects teachable in school.

Also, people who like the STE of STEM, tend to not end up in public education (Math being the possible exception), schools are filled with adults with no interest in STE (but I admit the interest in M can vary wildly). So having some extra encouragement for STE might help make the amount of STEM taught in school to match the interest in STEM that the students have.